Monday, October 13, 2008 Editorial: A voice in the wilderness
IN Sunday's special report on landslide concerns by Sun.Star Davao, Mines and Geosciences Bureau 11 geoscience division chief Diana Kristina Velasco bewailed the refusal of residents and even local government units (LGU) to heed warnings from MGB that certain areas are prone to landslides.
It can be a frustrating work indeed, when you go up all those mountains in the region, come up with your findings, and then be disregarded or worse, treated as a doomsayer.
What Ms Velasco is experiencing in her work, however, can be expected. No one wants the inconvenience and expense of having to move out of one's home, especially if that home and the lot it stands on have already been acquired by the occupant.
It's hard enough to own a house. It's even harder to buy another one.
In such a situation, it is up to the government, the one tasked to put in some sense in the chaos that we call society, our communities.
Government has the power, the laws, the experts, and the consultants. It also has the links to resources, even if government itself always lacks resources.
Armed with such warnings, local government officials should not brush these off as technical matters that they cannot understand, as this official from the City of Mati brushed off MGB reports that list Davao Oriental as having many barangays that are in high and extremely high risk of earth movements.
Brushing off such concerns is the worst a government can do to its people. Even a child knows how to go about learning things it does not understand, he asks why. If mother does not have the answer, then father is there, even ate and kuya, and yaya.
It is unthinkable then for an LGU, who has its own engineers, consultants, private sector allies and friends, and the support of national government agencies like MGB to ask from, to just brush off warnings of catastrophe.
Brushing off technical findings as too technical will not make it any less understandable nor will it make the risk go away. But asking what it means, what must be done, and what other help do we need with a firm commitment to do as advised can mean the difference between tragedy and good governance.
The list of susceptible areas to mass movements in Region 11 as covered under the National Geohazard Mapping Program of MGB is available for anyone who wants to check.
The indications of high, very high, and extremely high risk are not that hard to understand. And may we just add that barangay Masara in Maco, Compostela Valley, that mountain-locked barangay buried in earth just last September, was listed as "high risk." We wonder then what worse fate awaits those in the "extremely high risk".
The report is within every LGUs reach, we hope the efforts and resources put into this geohazard mapping will not be put to naught. Let not this report become just another one of those papers we browse through after the fact.
Just over out there, in our backyard, is an old smokey mountain along the Diversion Road in Ma-a that we know is nothing but old garbage, millions of tons of old garbage thrown over a cliff. May government see the growing number of houses there as worthy of concern before they become victims of landslides themselves and become just beneficiaries of relief goods, if they survive.
Still brewing too but not getting much notice are the protests of Ma-a homeowners occupying the foot of Matina (Shrine) Hills against housing development projects in the flanks of Ma-a hills that have been determined to be unstable.
Questions of where we will put these people are but acts of procrastination, so that the problem will not be faced for as long as the earth does not move. In the meantime, let us all pray... that we will not run out of prayers.
